2 years after visiting some of China's most infamous ghost cities and malls, Australian reporter Adrian Brown revisited them for SBS Dateline, to see if they had changed.

His tour of Tianducheng, the Paris replica that we reported on, the South China Mall, and Kangbashi in Ordos, China's most famous ghost city, showed that they were still empty.

Tom Miller, a Chinese urbanization expert told Brown, it's as though Chinese officials "basically draw a circle on a map and they build it, and then they expect people to go and move in." The "gamble" is that cities might be empty now, but they will be filled up later, an argument Stephen Roach has previously made.